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their flashing disdain. 'I do forgive,' exclaimed she, 'what I despise too much to resent, but I owe some disavowal to myself.'" With womanly dignity she then briefly explains to De Joinville the sacred and acknowledged engagement which had subsisted between her and Evelyn.
Deeply did the iron enter into her soul, but Francesca now no longer reproached herself for her former change of feeling; how completely was it justified! her growing dislike had been as it were a natural warning,—the good revolting from the bad. Let us observe here, how strongly, yet how delicately, has the author delineated the almost intuitive recoil of woman's nature from what is bad in principle or wrong in conduct: "I felt (said Francesca to Evelyn) your unworthiness even before I knew it!"
There is a delicate species of the mimosa, whose leaves not only recede at the touch, but from the near approach of any extraneous object: thus sensitively does the innate propriety of woman shrink from the presence of moral evil.
Again, with equal discrimination is another general truth embodied in a trait of Francesca's character. "She felt as if life had suddenly lost its interest; yet it was not the lover that she regretted, but the love."
In such a case it is the influence that disappointment and treachery have upon the mind in destroying the ideal of truth and of love, that is to be regretted even more than the loss of the individual attachment. "The qualities most natural to youth are at once destroyed; suspicion takes the place of confidence, reserve of reliance, distrust instead of that ready belief in all that was good and beautiful; knowledge has come too soon,—knowledge of evil, unqualified by the general charities which longer
